The Future of Downtown Cedar Rapids

 

Bullish views of downtown Cedar Rapids were expressed by a public-private partnership of a panel Tuesday morning, sponsored by the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell, Jesse Thoeming of the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, and two business owners applauded the vast increase in downtown housing and the flood protection that has enabled it, while hoping for more ideas to sustain downtown growth.

Construction underway on the "banjo block":
A game-changer I can get behind

Darryl High, a property developer and also chair of the Downtown Self-Supported Municipal Improvement District (SSMID), said downtown was at last "becoming an urban neighborhood." High cited much new construction as well as conversions of office space, concluding it will serve to "bring more people" which will eventually lead to service providers. Mayor O'Donnell anticipates a wider variety of housing that will lead to "people walking their dogs downtown." This vision of a 24-hour downtown has taken awhile to emerge, but is good to hear. 

Andy Schumacher, co-owner of Cobble Hill restaurant downtown as well as Caucho in New Bohemia, says he's noticed since Cobble Hill opened in February 2013 that office workers go home after work, and that a different crowd comes out to dinner in the evening, if it indeed it appears at all. A residential population might well be the key to sustaining downtown energy, particularly if a wider set of housing choices could allow for more "lower-middle-class vibe" than the pricey condos that have led development for the past few years. 

The Iowa Building (1914) is being retrofitted for housing
(Google Street View screen capture)

Schumacher's comments echo those of Jane Jacobs, who in a long, lyrical passage in The Death and Life of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011: 65-71] described the ballet of the good city sidewalk... in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. This dance happened in the course of every day--without needing special festivals or events to get people there!

Jane Jacobs

On Hudson Street in New York's Greenwich Village sixty years ago, the ballet began with residents leaving for work, businesses opening their doors, and middle school students walking to school.

I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) (68)

Over the course of the day, the sidewalk sees elementary school students, commuters emerging from subways and taxis, shoppers, the lunchtime crowd, workers on break, children released from school, people stopping to shop on the way home, diners, and nighttime dog walkers. Her writing is so lovely, particularly considering her actual purpose is to make an argument, that I can hardly resist quoting the whole six pages. You should read them for yourself... along with the rest of this timeless book! 

Fair question: Will Downtown residents shop at corner stores
when there's a 67000 square foot Hy-Vee six minutes' drive away?

Schumacher noted the ease of auto-commuting in the Cedar Rapids metro area means that a mobile population isn't necessarily going to stay in the downtown area. How a "vibrant, growing downtown" (High) develops within "a very suburban town" (Schumacher) is a perplexing question--really worth thinking about as the conversation shifts, as it inevitably does, to what attractions the downtown should seek. ("What are workers looking for?" asks the mayor.) 

• It is possible that Cedar Rapids' core will grow through in-migration of telecommuters looking for a less expensive but still urban version of their current cities. ("Look at us! We're cheap... and kinda urban... just don't pay attention to the legislature, lol!!") Thoeming suggested doing the riverfront right could make us stand out to would-be digital nomads. 
• It is possible that the much-talked-about big regional attraction, which Mayor O'Donnell thankfully has repackaged as "an entertainment complex with a casino in it," will draw residents as well as encouraging visitors to check out other downtown establishments. (Schumacher called this "a question I don't have the answer to.") 

Market After Dark promo, from Cedar Rapids
Downtown Farmers Market Facebook page

• It is possible that Downtown will mostly draw people in for big events, like the farmers' market and outdoor movies, or "closing 2nd Street every once in awhile" (the mayor).

Do we need to provide the rest of the region with reasons to "come visit downtown" (Darryl High), or do we follow Strong Towns' dictum that...

Drive-in visitors will need places to park, of course, crowding residents and leading to the vast swaths of parking lots that already plague the core of our town. Check out my town, or your town, at the interactive map created by Katya Kisin (2022). All that parking creates space that increases the distance between destinations, so walking is less convenient and the land less productive.

Darryl High said that Downtown has been in contact with other SSMIDs like the MedQuarter and New Bohemia on having a trolley route around the area. This would be great, if frequent enough, augmenting public transportation in an important way. Overall, as Brent Toderian argues, development of core areas needs to emphasize alternatives to cars:

[I]t has to be multimodal. In fact, it has to have active transport priority: walking, biking and transit have to be emphasized. If you try to design density around cars, it's a recipe for failure. You have to make walking, biking and transit not just available, but delightful. (quoted in Roberts 2017) 

An hour's discussion is hardly enough to touch on all the facets of downtown development, but I would have like to have seen more attention to socioeconomic inclusion/equity. The restauranteur Andy Schumacher, whom I quoted above, did call for greater variety of housing types and prices within the downtown area. 

There was no discussion, however, in response to the moderators' question about connectivity, of connections to core residential neighborhoods like Wellington Heights, Oakhill-Jackson, and the Taylor Area. As of now downtown is surrounded by a gigantic doughnut of emptiness that separates it from all other parts of town. If we could close some of that, and create seamless connections to the city's most densely populated and diverse areas, it would do wonders for individual economic opportunity, and the resilience of the local economy, not to mention vibe.

8th Street SE bisects an "empty quarter" between 
Downtown and Wellington Heights
(Google Street View screen capture from May 2022)

Another issue would be how to assist locally-owned, small businesses to populate the downtown area. (See my report on a talk by Ellen Shepherd of Community Allies, or the array of evidence aggregated by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.)

[Personal note: As I bicycled to get coffee before the webinar, 25 cars went by me on 3rd Avenue SE. Only seven were headed towards downtown; 17 were outbound, and one was doing the funky cross at 14th Street. This is only one 1.5 mile data point on one morning, but it is interesting and might signify broader trends?] 

The panel was moderated by Gazette columnist Michael Chevy Castranova and reporter Marissa Payne.

SEE ALSO: 

     Marissa Payne, "Cedar Rapids Looks to Re-Imagine Downtown, Shifting from Office Center to Entertainment," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 26 June 2022

     Rick Reinhard and Chris Elisara, "A Call to Rethink Dying Houses of Worship," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 7 June 2022. [By my count, only five churches remain in the Downtown Cedar Rapids area: Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, First Presbyterian, Grace Episcopal, St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox, and Veritas; only the aging but thriving First Presbyterian has a substantial physical footprint. Getting into the MedQuarter and Wellington Heights is a different story.]

PREVIOUSLY ON HOLY MOUNTAIN:

"Cedar Rapids Mayoral Runoff 2021," 22 November 2021

"Envisioning CR I: A 24-Hour Downtown," 1 March 2015

"News from Downtowns," 23 June 2017